Tag Archive for SDN

In virtual and cloud environments, network traffic often flows into a virtualization, then back out, forwarded to another device, usually security, before it re-enters the virtual environment. I call this a “sadly defined network,” not software-defined. Many of my colleagues claim that this is not true. They say that an SDN keeps east-west traffic within…

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Software-defined networking (SDN) is clearly one of the hot items of the tech field at the moment. VMware’s purchase of Nicira precipitated a sea change, leading to today’s plethora of SDN vendors and array of competing technologies. It reminds me the early noughties—the introduction of virtualization, competing hypervisor technology stacks and Unix/Linux Zones*—followed by the…

It’s that time again. VMworld 2014 opens in San Francisco on Monday, August 25. With fifty sessions covering network virtualization and security this year, it is clear that VMware is once again pushing software defined networking (SDN) and NSX, and that is as serious about the software defined network as it is about the rest of the…

On April second, Cisco introduced something that seems to make a lot of sense in its new declarative-based, ACI-led world of software-defined networking: a policy mechanism. The blog post about it was pretty straightforward: it included the obligatory nods toward the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and open-source communities, defined the differences between the traditional…

Despite all of the rapid innovation and the incredible rate of change in technology, there are some things that you can count on. One of those things is that the transition from hardware to software is a cyclical one, and if you look at any one segment of the market long enough, that becomes apparent.…

SDN is getting a lot of hype at the moment. Coupled with its kissing cousin, network virtualization, it is all the buzz. So what exactly is it? At its most basic level, SDN is an approach to networking in which the control plane is decoupled from hardware and given over to a software controller.

Many network virtualization products appear to be aimed at the top 10,000 customers worldwide, accounting for their price as well as their published product direction. While this is a limited and myopic view, many claim it is for the best, their reason being that network virtualization is only really needed by the very large networks. The more I think about this approach, the more I believe it is incorrect. Let us be frank here. Most networking today, within many different organizational sizes, is a hodgepodge of technologies designed to solve the same problem(s) over and over: how to get data quickly from point A to point B with minimum disruption to service.

While SPB is a very interesting protocol, my questions were about how deep into the virtual environment the protocol extends. While SPB and other networking protocols are considered by some to be network virtualization, I could not see this within the realm of the virtual network and hence, confusion reigned supreme. Depending on who is talking to each other, the same words can mean many different things. What I found amazing, still, is that most people thinks networking ends at the physical NIC within the virtualization host, and that what is inside, does not matter as much as what is outside.

Over the last few weeks I have been struggling with automating deployment and testing of virtual desktops for my own edification. This struggle has pointed out automation weaknesses which need to be addressed for automation and the software defined data center to succeed and not only be deployed from software but also self-healing and all the great things we associate with SDDC, SDN, etc. But current automation has some serious flaws and weaknesses. In essence, in order to automate something you must have a well known exact image from which to work.